Branding is a word commonly used to justify failures in sales.
The most basic idea behind a business owner is that he will get a great product and everyone will love it and buy it.
From this starting point, the catalyst to increase the spreading of the product are sales people.
You want them to talk about your product, get potential clients interested and get them to purchase the product.
This basic formula: “Get a product, get people to sell it, get people to buy it” does work and forever will. Yet it must be considered as a pretty dumb generalization of how people actually buy things.
Branding in general consist of embedding a deep and emotional meaning into a name.
There’s actually a big conflict here, because a name, a word, is logical stuff, while emotions are something almost intangible, hardly falsifiable.
It’s like you can make a person feel your emotions via your writing but you cannot fake that emotion. There’s a hidden pattern that comes out of emotion, and I believe that pattern can be synthesized into a single word: “Context”.
It’s the context that gives meaning to words, same goes for how phrases give context for emotions. The art of expressing emotions through writing is the capability of taking the reader’s mind and allowing it to flow through the concepts while he is almost unconscious of it.
A quick example: Let’s say you buy a piano. The rational question would be: “Why?”
The rational answer could be: “I want to learn about music.” And that’s it.
Yet behind the willingness to learn music and the interest that drove you toward buying that piano, we can surely find some emotion: maybe you saw a pianist and felt a shiver and knew that you wanted to be able to express yourself in the same way, or maybe you were jealous of what is generally called “talent”.
Beyond everything I’d honestly say that I believe you bought the piano because you found someone that was so good at it that he was able to create a small world inside of that “piano session”, a world so dense and rich that you felt drawn toward it.
As primary motivation beyond survival and reproduction I believe us humans are strictly tied to our hands.
You see, our hands are so sensible and rich of neuronal pathways that they are enormous inside of our brain.
The hands and sensibility are so important that a blind person will go ahead and have is brain restructured to the point that his “visual cortex” (The occipital part of the brain) will have hands related information in it.
So let’s get back to branding.
In order to brand properly you first of all need to know what your brand is all about.
Are you making shoes? What makes them unique and cool?
What’s cool by the way?
I believe cool is strictly related to how a stand-up comedian is able to say crazy shit and get away with it. And the reason why he can do so stands in his simple decision of being completely transparent, he’s going to say what you feel like he’s going to say, because in those brief moments he is acting a character and he is willing to go the full way with it. In other words he is coherent.
He made a decision and stuck with it.
The same goes for branding, you make a decision and stand by it one hundred percent.
Hence the first step, when you want to brand yourself, your project or your company is to be clear in what you are going to do and then always abide to it.